Lasers tend to do that, especially when the drive system of the bot keeps driving the attacker into (and often through) it's target.

FireStorm (which is a similar design to Tumbler, but not invertible) is fairly effective too, with 3x 1 capacitance cannons fixed forwards and essentially the same drive code it'll just ram it's targets at full speed while pouring plasma into it (which is why I listed it as 'Plasma Melee') Which while not as effective at total dismemberment as a laser bot is, still has it's merits as an attack mode (since it can still hit it's target at range to cause enough damage to make it easier to finish off it's opponent at melee range)

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"Never assume that anything you've never seen before is benign. Most particularly not something that says 'MARINES' on it."

Right, my combat bot now has a functional weapons system. It's got no armour yet, so it will probably be destroyed by anything with ranged weapons. I put it up against Pressurelines Sawtooth, and that made for a rather interesting match.

Match summary:>First blood goes to the broadside, knocking off a couple of floaters.>Gets a few shots in while staying out of the Sawtooths attack range.>The battle starts to get into a tight corner, hindering the broadsides ability to keep away.>Things get rather messy, with both bots rammed in a corner.>Eventually ends up with a head-on collision, resulting in the broadside loosing a cannon and a hook.>Overall outcome is the Sawtooth stuck on its side against a wall, and the Broadside driving around completely ignoring the stationary target.

Might have been the arena (lavafield) but Broadside never quite seemed to really get into it. Especially after a close encounter with SawTooth's lasers which detached one of it's wheels and caused it to spend a lot of the rest of the match using the jet to right itself until FireStorm caught it in one of the start 'garages' and finished the job.

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"Never assume that anything you've never seen before is benign. Most particularly not something that says 'MARINES' on it."

Actually, I've been seeing the same sort of thing on all the matches I've tried after that. I know it doesn't handle multiple opponents well, especially if they're not moving fast enough to be detected.

Most of the problem seems to be that it's getting too close to the target and not circling around it. Hopefully that will be resolved somewhat if it reverses the drive when it detects it's too close to both the terrain and its target.

Perhaps I'll just go with a strategy that doesn't require avoiding collisions with the target.

That thing's pretty cool and works well, especially considering how few parts it uses. I had a couple of test matches, and one of them even managed to damage a PressureTank. The only issue I've noticed is that they like getting stuck either upside-down or on loose continuums. The cannon looks as though it would work as a self-righting mechanism without adding any parts.

UPDATE: I've just seen the Goblin score an absurdly lucky shot against the SawTooth, putting a shot right between the floaters on the front armour to hit the elbow that the lasers are mounted on. It managed to do that right as the lasers were being deployed, resulting in them being thrown away.

There is a bit of reasoning behind this, so bear with me: It makes each weightclass a bit broader, and better represents (imo) the way combat power escalates with increased partcount. It should also have the effect of making any potential swarmbots a bit more competiticve, since now a combo of 2 max weight light bots counts as a single middleweight entry, and not a heavyweight.

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"Never assume that anything you've never seen before is benign. Most particularly not something that says 'MARINES' on it."

Canary is a middleweight hovering Plasma Shooter capable of tracking engaging ground based targets but has limited function against other aerial targets. The black/yellow block is the altitude control block, when detached it becomes extremely heavy and almost impossible to move, detaching this block also triggers the lift system to engage.

That looks good. I wonder how well it'll hold up only being able to fire backwards while being one of the slowest bots out there?

In this case:

Not well. That being said, while doing the run-in testing for Canary I've seen shots sail through the armor and jets and squarely strike the continuum at the back of the upper turret causing the whole turret and aiming system to fail, so sometimes it just comes down to luck.

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"Never assume that anything you've never seen before is benign. Most particularly not something that says 'MARINES' on it."

The turret on my old bot does do the full ballistic equations and leads the target, so it should still be fairly competitive if it survives long enough to acquire a target. However, I assume it's no longer calibrated right after all the tweaks to plasma cannons, and IIRC it still uses an integrator to do the inverse trig functions, so it probably doesn't handle fast moving targets well.

If you are using shoot_force as the primary method of working out the speed of the plasma bolts you should be about fine, that relationship hasn't really changed, the only difference is how much force you get per capacitance.

Also! 'New' arena up: Tech Arena Hex. It's a big, open arena, will definitely suit fast bots with decent target following abilities more than the bots we were running back in 2014 where on an arena this large you could end up waiting for a long time before the bots would actually engage.

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"Never assume that anything you've never seen before is benign. Most particularly not something that says 'MARINES' on it."